Tag Archive for Kubernetes

Standing in the main expo hall of KuberCon+CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 in Copenhagen, the richness of the Kubernetes ecosystem is readily apparent. There are booths everywhere, addressing all the infrastructure needs for an enterprise cluster. There are meetings everywhere for the open source projects that make up the Kubernetes and Cloud Native base of technology. The keynotes are full. What was a 500-person conference in 2012 is now, 6 years later, a 4300-person conference even though it’s not in one of the hotbeds of American technology such as San Francisco or New York City.

What is amazing is how much Kubernetes has grown in such a short amount of time. It was only a little more than a year ago that Docker released it’s Kubernetes competitor called Swarm. While Swarm still exists, Docker also supports, and arguably is betting the future, on Kubernetes.

Kubernetes came out of Google, but that doesn’t really explain why it expanded like the early universe after the big bang. Google is not the market leader in the cloud space – it’s one of the top vendors but not the top vendor – and wouldn’t have provided enough market pull to drive the Kubernetes engine this hot. Google is also not a major enterprise infrastructure software vendor the way IBM, Microsoft, or even Red Hat and Canonical are.

Kubernetes benefited from the first mover effect. They were early into the market with container orchestration, were fully open source, and had a large amount of testing in Google’s own environment. Docker Swarm, on the other hand, was too closely tied to Docker the company to appease the open source gods.

Now, Kubernetes finds itself like a new college graduate. It’s all grown up but needs to prepare for the real world. The basics are all in place and its mature but there is enormous amount of refinement and holes that need to be filled in for it to be a common part of every enterprise software infrastructure. KubeCon+CloudNativeCon shows that this is well underway. The focus now is on security, monitoring, network improvement, and scalability. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of concern about stability or basic functionality.

Kubernetes has eaten the container world and didn’t get indigestion. That’s rare and wonderful.

I try to keep current on technology. As weird as it may seem, to be an IT industry analyst, you don’t have to know much about technology. You can understand the market without knowing the technology that drives it. It’s limiting but possible.

To really understand IT customers – truly grok them – you need to live a bit in their world. It is my belief that understanding technology provides insights into the market.

More importantly, I like information technology, programming, and and all things geeky. It was my profession for many years before moving to the business side and my heart is still there. So, it is for myself as much as my clients and audience that I continue to go deep in technology.

I have also recently discovered Humble Bundle. They make collections of e-books, comics, and games available for a very low price and donate much of the proceeds to various charities. You can donate as little as US$1.00 and get four or five books. Check them out. They’re awesome.

Subsequently, I have been feasting on technical books on a variety of subjects. Besides my usual array of technology sites and news, here’s what I have been reading.

Getting Started with Kubernetes, Jonathan Baier, Packt – Introduction and tutorial for Kubernetes.

Blockchain Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction in 25 Steps, Daniel Drescher, Packt – ntroduction to Blockchain. The non-traditional style was hard for me to get used to.

Mastering Blockchain, Imran Bashir, Packt – More traditional and in-depth introduction to Blockchain and major implementations of it such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. I’m reading this now.

I’ve got a lot of books coming up – I bought 41 of them for something like US$35 – including a set of Java books, and more on Cloud, Data Science, and Blockchain/Bitcoin. There’s a book on OpenStack that looks interesting. R in a Nutshell, Thoughtful Machine Learning with Python, and Java 8 Lambdas are all possibilities too. That assumes that Humble Bundle doesn’t wave something interesting in my face. I almost bought the last Python bundle but resisted. Oh, and I have a ton of Linux books waiting in the wings too.

Of course, the group above tracks my current interests. I’ve been writing code in Java since the 1990s when Java v1.0 was mostly a associated with adding applets to websites. Cloud, Containers, DevOps, Blockchain, and Data Science are top of mind for me professionally and the IT community as a whole. These books talk to the everyday work of developers which is what interests me the most.

So, I’m more than happy to settle in with a good book so long as it’s techy.